I found a Toshiba Portégé R100 lying around at work. I was between portables at
the time, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to dust it off
and see how well it performed with Linux.

hardware

768M of RAM,

1Ghz Pentium M

trident microsystems cyberblade xp4m32 (xorg trident driver)

Ubuntu

I had an Ubuntu 10.04 i386 install CD available so I used that. I used an external USB
CD-ROM to boot from. Contrary to some reports on the web, the R100 BIOS can boot from
an external CD-ROM drive. Perhaps it is just picky about which ones it likes? The BIOS
version in this R100 is 1.50 (release 11/25/2004).

Initial thoughts

Sound playback is a bit stuttery and I got two login noises playing over
themselves on initial login. I turned gnome sounds off so I don't know if
this was a one-off.

The screen resolution is about an inch short of the bevel on all sides of the
display. xrandr reports the resolution to be 800x600 (and that the maximum
resolution is 800x600). The native resolution looks like it should be nearer
1024x768. This
xorg.conf
solves the problem. I need to pair this xorg down a bit to figure out which
instructions precicely are required (probably a subset). Really, the X driver
should discover the correct values.

Occasionally on login the VGA resolution switches to something daft - X thinks
it is 1024x768 but it's a zoomed in corner of the screen. Switching VTs cures
this.

I haven't convinced the laptop to suspend via pm-suspend within X - I just get
a blinking cursor on a console window. Outside X, echo mem > /sys/power/state
works, but I haven't convinced it to resume again.